9.3.14

THE NEW YORK DOLLS AT SELFRIDGES

Back in 1973 The New York Dolls came to London and played
in Biba's, the fashionable department store on Kensington High Street. During the afternoon
of the gig Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane, Dolls guitarist and bassist
respectively, went strolling around the store and, as was their want, nicked
some gear or, at least, switched some price tags. Unfortunately the store
security saw them and they were promptly arrested and marched into the office
of Barbara Hulanicki, the divine founder of the store. "They were two
bedraggled looking creatures... reluctantly we had to let them go," she
later wrote.

All of this came to mind on the
evening of March 10, 2006, when I went to see The New York Dolls, or what
remains of them, playing in a large area of the basement of Selfridges
department store on Oxford Street. It was called the Ultra Lounge and it was
very dark and noisy and smoky, and throughout the evening beautiful models in
off-the-shoulder short black dresses with long legs and six-inch heels plied me
with champagne as I shouted above the din, trying to make small talk with old
friends from the music press.
The event was to
mark the opening of a punk fashion week, though quite why the Dolls had been
flown over at huge expense from New York for one free gig escaped me
completely. For starters they weren’t really punks, more 60% glam, 35% Rolling
Stones clones with the remaining 5% punk – but only in attitude, not musically.
Far better surely, to have had some genuine English punks up there signing
about nihilism than these excitable New Yorkers looking for a kiss.
It was strictly
invitation only and the invites themselves – big yellow pieces of plastic with cut
out letters – indicated that this was a swish do. It was only thanks to the
intervention of my old pal Bob Gruen, the NY-based photographer, that I got an
invite from the snooty PR lady at Selfridges, who was initially unwilling to
part with one in my direction as I was neither an influential taste-maker nor a
photogenic celebrity. She told me that entry was limited to 200, so unlike most
freebies it wasn’t overcrowded. In the event I was probably one of a tiny
minority there who’d actually seen the Dolls in their heyday, in the early
Seventies, when all of them were alive – well, not the first drummer
admittedly, but she wasn’t to know that. Bob’s iconic pictures of punks in
CBGBs and elsewhere adorned one wall of the Ultra Lounge, and were on sale at
fabulous prices. On another wall were life-size pictures of punk girls in
‘interesting’ Agent Provocateur lingerie. What with the models sashaying provocatively around the room, it was a very sexy evening.
Until the Dolls
appeared the DJ played punk and reggae for two hours, and I circulated with a
rarely empty champagne flute chatting to a surprisingly large number of people
I knew or was introduced to. One of the latter, curiously enough, was the journalist who was
conducting an interview with John Entwistle at the exact moment Pete Townshend
phoned to tell him that Keith Moon had died the previous night. We swapped Who
stories. My old mate Glen Matlock was there too – long ago I published his
book, I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol –
and Keith Allen, the actor and former hedonist, whom I played alongside in the
Rough Trade XI cricket team back in the eighties and whose daughter has since become more famous than him. (I remember Lily as a toddler playing at the edge of cricket pitches.)
It would have been around midnight when the Dolls finally tottered on to the small stage in their high heels
and finery but they played so excruciatingly loud that I was hard pressed to identify anything
other than the opening number, ‘Personality Crisis’, a song that was played endlessly at Max's Kansas City, the arty bar and venue in Union Square where I used to hang out in NY before Ashley's opened. Thereafter the Dolls turned up
and up and, in a room with a relatively low ceiling which was never intended
for live music anyway, the sound degenerated into a great wash of noise that
repelled all but those with no concern for their eardrums. I don’t think my
ears have been assaulted in such a way since I stood on John’s side of the
stage for Who shows back in the Seventies. As ever, David Jo pranced around
like Mick Jagger, colliding into Sylvain – the only other living and breathing
original Doll – and sharing his mike. Also on stage were an additional
guitarist, a bassist and drummer, all of whom looked like they could be David
Jo’s prodigal sons but they were all up to the task and despite the volume the
Dolls didn’t disappoint.
Between songs one
of the models lingering tantalisingly close to me leaned over to ask the name
of the band. “The New York Dolls,” I shouted into her perfectly-shaped ear.
“Where are they from?” she shouted in mine, thus reinforcing the long held view
that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive.
My ears were still
ringing when I climbed into bed, and it’s the first time that had happened for as
long as I can remember. Also, incidentally, there were no reports of any of the
Dolls helping themselves to unpaidfor goods.